Different Ways of Saying "Drunk" in the United States (1)

1. CORK HIGH AND BOTTLE DEEP

You might hear this colorful idiom in Georgia. In a 1960 novel, Walk Egypt, a group of Atlanta fishermen are nearly suffocated by a stopped-up chimney. “They was cork-high and bottle deep,” a character says. “Or they’da smelled it.”

 

2. DRUNK AS A BOWDOW

This term for “very drunk” is probably a variation of drunk as a boiled owl, according to DARE. Why “boiled”? It’s slang for “intoxicated,” with the earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) from 1885, perhaps along the same lines of being stewed or pickled. Why owl? That’s not as clear. DARE Chief Editor George Goebel suggests that “the image of the owl as a comically solemn and somewhat stupid bird is certainly evocative of certain stages of drunkenness.”

 

3. PIFFLICATED

This word for tipsy or drunk seems to be a riff on spifflicated, another old-timey term for drunk. Spifflicated seems to have first been used by American writer O. Henry in 1902 and comes from the verb spiflicate, meaning “to deal with in such a way as to confound or overcome completely.” Pifflicated—also, piffed, pifficated, and piffled—might be used in New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine, Iowa, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

 

（mentalfloss.com)

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